MTBoS Booth at NCTM Boston

tldr: There’s going to be a MTBoS booth at NCTM Boston! We could use your help in the following ways:

• Sometime soon, you can tweet on the hashtag #WhyMTBoS a reason why the MTBoS is great.
• If you’re attending NCTM Boston, you can sign up to spend time staffing the booth.
• If there’s an MTBoS project or endeavor that would be great to highlight at the booth, let us know about it!
• Let us borrow your internet browsing device for NCTM— iPads would be excellent.

And we’ll be running a new Explore MTBoS online excursion after NCTM Boston, so watch this space!

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As you might have seen, on Sunday we tweet-announced some small parts of our booth plans and made some requests:

We’re gearing up for the #MTBoS booth at #NCTMBoston. Will you tweet your own #WhyMTBoS so we can share your thoughts with attendees?

— Explore MTBoS (@ExploreMTBoS) March 15, 2015

We’re gearing up for the #MTBoS booth at #NCTMBoston. Are you involved with a project you’d like highlighted there? Let us know!

— Explore MTBoS (@ExploreMTBoS) March 15, 2015

You also may have noticed that these tweets came from @ExploreMTBoS and that we’ve woken up this blog. Did we pique your interest? We hope so!

 The Math Twitter Blogosphere has an official booth in the exhibit hall at the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Like, table, banner, curtains, chairs, the whole deal! This booth might serve many purposes:

• Let’s meet at the MTBoS booth and decide where to go for dinner!
• OMG, I lost my dongle. Can someone pretty please run a Mac adapter to the MTBoS booth that I can borrow for my presentation?
• I heard Christopher is working the booth at 3:00. I hope he’ll sign my shapes book download!!

But the real goal of the booth is to share the wonders of our community with the wider world of math teachers. The hope is that the booth will be an entry point for teachers who might not find our online community otherwise. But this community is vast and multi-faceted. A two minute spiel at the booth or a handout of a few resources is a great first step, but there’s so much more to see! So, we will be running a new Explore MTBoS event after NCTM to help people explore and participate in our community. Stay tuned!

To convince people they want to do that, we need some help:

If you aren’t attending NCTM, we still need your help! You can tweet or comment why you participate in this community (use #WhyMTBoS so we can find your tweet). And you can give suggestions of MTBoS projects and endeavors to highlight and items to have on hand in our booth space. 

If you’re attending NCTM, you can sign up for a time slot to work the booth. And you can also come by the booth early on to grab a #MTBoS sticker to alert other teachers that you’re in the know—because you don’t need to be standing under a banner to talk to people about why having on online math teaching community is great!

Which sticker will you choose?!

So what will the booth be like? Picture this: You’re walking up and down the aisles of the exhibit hall and you spot an interesting banner:

#MTBoS: Math Twitter Blogosphere

There’s a live twitter feed projected onto the curtain tracking the #NCTMBoston and #MTBoS hashtags. On one end of the table there’s an array of business cards and stickers representing many of the projects in our community. There’s a stack of sturdy info sheets to browse at the table, highlighting many aspects of our community (e.g. Twitter chats, TMC, Global Math). Plus there will be books to flip through and enticing baskets of prizes for raffling. (Note: we won’t sell anything at the booth because taxes and complicated stuff.)

Here’s a run-down of our plan for the booth so far. Please let us know if you have some specifics to add in or a new idea that could be incorporated!

• Lovely and welcoming decor
  • A big blank hanging poster for people to sign with their twitter handles, blogs, names, and greetings.
  • #WhyMTBoS curtain mini-posters (half size sheets with color photos of avatars)
  • Poster of MTBoS events and meet-ups happening during NCTMBoston (including Shadow Con: Thursday, 5pm, Room 258A)
  • Schedule of who is working the booth, and when
  • Schedule of NCTM presenters who are involved in the MTBoS
  • Schedule of MTBoS presenters at other conferences
• Browsable things
  • Foam-core info objects (in a pile or magazine holder)
    • Schedule of the Twitter Chats with some avatars and topics
    • Global Math schedule and highlights
    • One-stop Resources
    • Samples of things like printouts of visual patterns that people can hold (and toothpicks to play with the toothpick patterns?)
    • Tweets about #WhyMTBoS (more of them!)
    • Tweet-ups (including social events at NCTM’s)
    • Announcement and description of upcoming Explore MTBoS event
  • Projection from tweetdeck onto the curtain or a large paper, allow people to tweet questions as @ExploreMTBoS
  • A computer or two (ideally tablets) (Can we borrow yours?)
    • with feedly up (and matheme and virtual filing cabinets)
    • tweetdeck open with #NCTM and #MTBoS
    • people can ask questions from @ExploreMTBoS
  • Copies of Nix the Trix, Common Core Math for Dummies, Powerful Problem Solving
• Informational takeaways
  • Cards that point to Explore MTBoS info page
  • Business cards/stickers for individual projects and sites
  • Handout of steps to making a Twitter account
• A Raffle/Estimation Task – doing an Estimation 180 is like way better than the ol’ jelly bean jar.

We’re looking forward to it. Thanks for your help, and we hope to see you at the conference!